At INFODAD, we rank everything we review with plus signs, on a scale from one (+) [disappointing] to four (++++) [definitely worth considering]. We mostly review (+++) or better items. Very rarely, we give an exceptional item a fifth plus. We are independent reviewers and, as parents, want to help families learn which books, music, and computer-related items we and our children love...or hate. INFODAD is a service of TransCentury Communications, Inc., Fort Myers, Florida, infodad@gmail.com.

You know where kids’ books
are going, more or less, whenever they start with the sentence, “X and Y are
best friends.” Rick Walton’s Girl &
Gorilla: Out and About opens with, “Girl and Gorilla are best friends.”
Laura Wall’s Goose Goes to the Zoo
begins, “Sophie and Goose are best friends.” And away we go! Walton’s book
features a city-dwelling, talking gorilla (well, why not?) who is inclined to
temper tantrums when he and Girl run into difficulties on their way to play at
the park. His solution to most problems involves doing something with his tail
– using it as a jump rope, for instance, or turning it into string for a kite –
until Girl points out, again and again, “You don’t have a tail.” After an
unsuccessful attempt to ride to the park on Girl’s bike (they hit a trash can),
Girl and Gorilla “walk and think and think and walk” as they come up with and
discard various methods of getting where they want to go. Get there by playing
hopscotch? Nope – hopping in one direction heads toward the park, but hopping
the other way leads away from it. Close their eyes and wish? Doesn’t work. Ride
an elephant? They don’t have one. But of course Girl and Gorilla are walking and thinking, which means that
they eventually walk right to the park. Gorilla’s joy when he realizes that
they have arrived is too big for one page: Joe Berger spreads the illustration
across two, with Gorilla’s huge arm spread taking in most of both pages as Girl
looks at him with quieter but no less sincere joy. Once in the park, Girl and
Gorilla play hopscotch, jump rope, make wishes at a fountain, and even ride an
elephant (well, an elephant-shaped slide). But now how will they get home? Even
very young readers will know that they are simply going to walk – although
Gorilla still hopes his (nonexistent) tail can help somehow. Throughout the
book, no one finds the pairing of Girl and Gorilla strange or even gives
Gorilla a second look – he is simply a playmate. How did Girl and Gorilla meet?
How did they become friends? Walton and Berger say nothing and show nothing –
readers just have to accept the reality of this unusual and warm friendship.

Wall does
explain how Sophie’s friendship with Goose began, but not in her latest book,
which is the third about this unlikely pair (after Goose and Goose Goes to
School). The fact is, though, that the characters’ original meeting matters
not at all here. What counts is that they are now best friends – but they
cannot do everything together: for
example, Goose at school did not work out at all, as Wall mentions in Goose Goes to the Zoo. Sophie feels bad
that Goose is left alone during school hours, so she takes her friend to the
zoo to look for another friend – one that Goose can play with while Sophie is
in class. Unlike Gorilla, Goose does not talk, and except for his close
friendship with Sophie, he behaves pretty much like a real goose. So his attempts
to make friends with various zoo animals misfire: the giraffe is friendly but
cannot fly, flamingos can presumably fly but just spend their time standing
around, and a smiling crocodile is interested in Goose for all the wrong
reasons (as a few flying feathers show). Eventually, though, Sophie and Goose
find the perfect friends for Goose: other geese! And that is wonderful, except
that – well, Goose fits in so well with those geese that Sophie wonders whether
he will come back to her at all. Eventually, though, he does, and he brings all
the other geese over to see her as well, because “there’s no friend quite like
Sophie.” And another unlikely friendship passes another unlikely test.

Even more unlikely than
these human-animal relationships are the things that happen in Linda Sue Park’s
Yaks Yak. This is a very clever
noun-and-verb-pairing book that never mentions parts of speech at all. Park
simply uses various animal names to refer both to the animals and to something
they are doing – and Jennifer Black Reinhardt makes sure that they are doing it
(whatever it is) very amusingly. Park carefully defines each verb form: she
explains that “to yak” means “to talk,” “to bug” (as in “Bugs bug bugs”) means
“to annoy,” “to parrot” (as in “Parrots parrot”) means “to repeat,” and so on. Some
of the pages are especially clever and especially funny. “Flounders flounder”
(“to flounder = to be helpless”) is hilarious, with the flat-eyed
bottom-dwellers trying to float or swim or something
while saying, with words inside circles that look like bubbles, such things as
“I did not mean to do that” and “I’m
spinning out of control.” And “badgers badger” (“to badger = to bother
repeatedly”) features one badger with an apple and another talking nonstop
about wanting the apple and really wanting it and really wanting it and asking to have it and wishing to share it and
maybe just getting a nibble and – well, and so forth. Clever in a different way
is the “rams ram” entry (“to ram = to strike horizontally”), on which a ram is
seen at the far right of the right-hand page saying “oops” because – as readers
will see when they turn the page – he has accidentally rammed a duck, so the
following phrase is, of course, “Duck, ducks!” Every entry here offers its own
form of amusement, whether “steers steer” in bumper cars (“to steer = to
guide”) or “crows crow” with a wide variety of forms of self-important
self-praise (“to crow = to boast”). At the book’s very end, Park tells readers
that the words are “homographs – words that are spelled and pronounced the
same, but have different meanings,” and she even explains the derivation of the
animal names and the actions that are spelled and said the same way. Yaks Yak is funny enough to read and
re-read, and contains enough just-buried information to be a goes-down-easily
learning experience for anyone so inclined.

There is not much to learn
from Dan Yaccarino’s illustrations in Five
Little Bunnies, an Easter-themed board book for the very youngest children
(up to age four). But there is still plenty of fun to be found here. The five
cartoon bunnies – blue, pink, yellow, orange and purple – scamper about a field
until they find a good place to start hiding Easter eggs, and then they do just
that, putting “striped ones, spotted ones – every kind” here and there. Then
they watch as kids hunt for and find the eggs, eat the candy inside, and play
outdoors – and then the bunnies, arrayed in a neat line, scamper down a
convenient hillside and away. Very young children can play an egg-finding game
with the book – the pictured kids are not seen locating all of them – and slightly older children can enjoy the easy
writing, comfortable pacing and pleasantly rounded illustrations, including a
neat one in which the bunnies’ heads are seen popping up to watch the children
doing their egg collecting. Neither the plot of the book nor the personalities
of the bunnies can match anything in Yaks
Yak or the stories of Girl and Gorilla or Sophie and Goose, but within the
limits of a short board book aimed at a very young readership, Five Little Bunnies has enough charm and
cuteness to enthrall kids – and perhaps get them eventually interested in the
antics of certain yaks, geese and gorillas.

Tom Watson manages both to
continue an ongoing series and to start a brand-new one in Stick Dog Tries to Take the Donuts. The main part of the book is
the fifth adventure of Stick Dog, the poorly-but-amusingly-drawn leader of a
pack of five poorly-but-amusingly-drawn strays (the others being Poo-Poo,
Stripes, Mutt and Karen). As in all the other books, the driving force here is
food – not hot dogs, ice cream or pizza this time, but donuts (spelled that
way) and, not incidentally, coffee, which Karen the dachshund tastes and which
makes her considerably more hyper than usual (yes, it is possible). Indeed,
“driving force” is a good phrase here, since the dogs’ encounter with donuts
happens when they come upon a bucket truck, the kind used for repairing power
lines, getting into trees, and doing other high-up things. And Stick Dog ends
up driving it – not the truck but the bucket – several times. The whole
adventure is as improbable as earlier ones, and follows the same pattern, in
which Stick Dog does the thinking while the other four dogs criticize him and
say he has no idea what he is doing and is lost somewhere in dreamland. For instance,
at one point Karen needs to be rescued, because she has her head jammed in a
large takeout coffee cup and cannot hear or see anything, so Stick Dog gently
picks her up and carries her to safety – at which point the other dogs tell him
that it is not right to eat Karen, no matter how hungry he and they may be.
Eventually two themes of these books come together: finding food and dealing
with Poo-Poo’s obsession with squirrels, which he deems his mortal enemies.
Stick Dog not only gets donuts but also uses the bucket to get to apples in a
tree, at which point he sees – a squirrel. So he takes the bucket down, gets
Poo-Poo into it, and brings it up again, so Poo-Poo can once and for all deal
with his nemesis. Except that it turns out that Poo-Poo does not attack the
squirrel after all – for good, sufficient and happy reasons. By the book’s
almost-end, the dogs have donuts and
apples to eat, but no more coffee to drink (Karen has had quite enough, Stick
Dog declares), and all ends well. But that is not quite the end – which is where the series startup comes in. After
completing the latest Stick Dog adventure, Watson – who behaves in these books
as if he is a preteen rather than an adult creating books for preteens – talks
about a girl “in my class” whom he kind of likes and who really, really
likes…cats. And she would just love to read something about cats, if only
Watson would write something about them. And so Watson is going to do just
that, creating a series about – wait for it – Stick Cat! There are even a few pages from the very first
(upcoming) Stick Cat book included at the very, very end here; and thus a new
series is born, or about to be born.

Stacy McAnulty’s series, The Dino Files, is being born in a
more-conventional way, with book number 1 – in which, in fact, both the series
and a dinosaur are born. A Mysterious Egg
introduces Frank L. Mudd, narrator and preteen dinosaur expert, and the
Dinosaur Education Center of Wyoming, which his grandparents own and which he
and his parents visit every summer. This
summer, his cousin Samantha (Sam) is there, too, being highly annoying by
being, well, a girl, and also because she does not even like dinosaurs. Also on
hand are Aaron Crabtree, the obligatory adversary in books of this sort, and
Aaron’s nasty father – who gets into a conflict with Frank’s grandmother (Gram)
over a dinosaur egg that Gram finds but that happens to have been on Crabtree
land. None of this might be a big deal, except for the fact that Saurus,
Frank’s cat, decides to sit on the fossil egg – and it, well, hatches. And various complications
ensue, involving who should and should not know about Peanut (so named because
he has a peanut-shaped horn on his nose, although in Mike Boldt’s illustrations
it sometimes looks disconcertingly like a large wart); and what Peanut needs to
eat; and where Peanut should live; and so on. The story arc here is a highly
familiar one for preteen series (a sort of alien-in-our-midst thing), and most
of the characters are pure types. Sam, for instance, “always pretends to talk
to an invisible camera” because, Frank explains, she “says she has to practice
being famous.” But The Dino Files is
a cut above similar series, at least potentially, because Frank really does
know about dinosaurs, and there is some genuine information here on how fossils
are found and what they are – plus use of real dinosaur names. Indeed, there is
enough potential learning here so a glossary (although admittedly a short one)
needs to be included. It remains to be seen whether The Dino Files will become deeper and more intriguing in subsequent
books, or whether it will turn into just another hunt-find-and-argue sort of
series. For now, though, is deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Jo Whittemore’s Confidentially Yours sequence, on the
other hand, is already showing in its first two books that there will be
nothing particularly distinctive about it. This is one of the innumerable
imitations of The Baby-Sitters Club,
that preteen-girl-oriented success of the 1980s and 1990s that included 35
novels by Ann M. Martin and 43 by Peter Lerangis (plus plenty more by other
authors). Whittemore’s take on this is to have three best friends – Brooke,
Vanessa and Heather – just starting middle school and becoming columnists for
the school newspaper, the Lincoln Log,
after signing up for a journalism elective. The girls are not the only
brand-new thing: the paper’s advice column, which they are to create, is new,
too. The baby-sitters started with four members, and so does this group,
because the teacher insists that a boy named Tim work with them to provide a
male perspective on whatever issues they write about. Whittemore intends to
focus each book on a different member of the advice-column set. Brooke’s Not-So-Perfect Plan deals with
overachiever Brooke realizing that with her demanding friendships, her travel
soccer team, her newspaper commitment and, oh yes, her school work, she may be
overextended. Dropping school work is unfortunately not an option, so how is
she going to juggle everything else? Might she have to stop doing the advice
column? Of course not (if she did, there would be no series, after all). Brooke,
who narrates this book (just as the baby-sitter books were narrated by each
character in turn), bemoans her life: “Last year, I did soccer, coed baseball,
made honor roll, and still had time for my family and friends. This year, I’m
failing at everything.” Eventually an incident with a lost dog convinces Brooke
that even though she is doing so much, her real problem is that she is not organized enough, and she gets a little
help figuring out how to use time more efficiently, and even turns that
information into an advice-column entry. So everything in this (+++) series opener
ends well.

Its (+++) successor focuses
on Vanessa, who loves fashion and her friends and the advice column – but
readers will already get all that, and if they don’t, Vanessa, who narrates
this volume, will soon tell them. Vanessa’s problem is competition: a new
neighbor named Katie moves to town from the glamorous world of Los Angeles (a
city that is always glamorous in books like this), and she may have even more style and more fashion savvy than Vanessa does, and that would be just awful. Soon the two are competitors not
only in how they look but also in how they see things – with the advice column
at the center of their dispute. The competition between Vanessa and Katie
quickly escalates to absurd levels, and the cluelessness of Vanessa’s parents –
a foundation of all series like this one – reaches even higher heights of
silliness. Then Vanessa helps a fellow student in a way that makes him a
success and gets her face and voice on television, and then there’s a party,
and then Katie and Vanessa decide they can really be friends rather than
competitors, and then “Katie and I hugged,” Vanessa writes, so everything is
forgiven and everything is fine and wonderful. Like the first book in the
series, this second one has a feel-good ending after some largely
inconsequential trials and tribulations – ones that do not feel inconsequential to the characters and presumably will not feel
that way to girls who read the books. The problem with Confidentially Yours is not that it fails to be well-meaning – it
is certainly that – but that the characters have little character and the
problems they face have been faced, in this form or a similar one, by so many
other characters in so many other series for preteen girls. Confidentially,
these books are fast reads, easy reads and not very meaningful reads.

“Transform Your Life?”
Really? Those who believe that celebrity-endorsed one-size-fits-all food and
nutrition fads have significance and staying power will surely want this guide
to a new one so they can make use of Elina Fuhrman’s approach and admonitions
diligently, even religiously, with full faith in their permanent value until
the next “in” thing comes along. Very big, very important, very soon to be
forgotten celebrities and other fad leaders have pushed the “cleanse” concept
for a while, with the result that Fuhrman actually created her own “cleanse”
idea in part as a response to the most-common existing one: “I was so tired of
scrolling through Instagram photos of just about everyone in LA ‘juice
cleansing’ that I wanted to shake things up. Don’t get me wrong; I love juicing
but you know what goes on during juice cleansing: You feel tired, you feel
dizzy, you feel hungry, your blood sugar goes up and down because of all the
sugary fruits mixed in with the greens. And by the time you are done, you are
so ready for a juicy cheeseburger.”

Well, with an endorsement
like that, who wouldn’t want to try a
cleanse? But Fuhrman’s, to give it and her some credit beyond the “wow, it’s
trendy” type, hits on something in this intense focus on soups. Soup is, or can
be, a hearty meal in itself, and many people – even the non-trendy – turn to it
as a comfort food as well as a bulwark against cold, rainy, snowy and generally
unpleasant weather. Soup can be nutrient-packed (although it isn’t always), and
anyone who really does want to build his or her diet around soup can do so in
comparatively straightforward and uncomplicated ways.

Of course, “straightforward
and uncomplicated” would not be hyper-trendy, so Soupelina’s Soup Cleanse is careful not to take an overly forthright approach. “All of [the soups in
the book] are made from scratch, using the freshest organic ingredients. …All
the soups are vegan, made from some familiar ingredients and some exotic ones,
too. …[Some] have medicinal and healing properties, too.” Well, hold on a moment:
now we are getting into the “nutraceutical” craze, the notion that just eating
certain things in certain ways will remove toxins from the body (the basic
“cleanse” idea) and will, as a positive side effect, eliminate the necessity of
dealing with the messiness of modern medicine and all the ills it allegedly
brings along with the cures it allegedly doles out in grudging fashion. It is
understandable that Fuhrman would take this approach, since she credits soups
with helping her recover from breast cancer, and she says directly that “soups
became a form of self-love and comfort as I changed the way I ate, gave up all
meat and dairy, and turned to plant-based foods.” So this book is built in part
on a foundation of extreme plant focus, a “wellness revolution that I believe
will transform the world and our health.” Well, it is fine that Fuhrman
believes soups transformed her
health, but that is a far cry from saying they will transform everyone’s health, and her ardent vegan
advocacy will certainly turn off people who may stumble upon this book but who
are more inclined to believe in “everything in moderation” than in “this is the
one and only way to eat and live and behave.”

So Fuhrman self-limits the
audience for Soupelina’s Soup Cleanse
through a kind of stridency that couples unattractively with self-assured complete
certainty. That is a recipe for a cult, not a soup. Nevertheless, the point is
worth making again: soups are, or
certainly can be, highly nutritious and the foundation of a healthful eating
regimen. Whether they are a useful “cleansing” tool is a matter of opinion, and
whether “cleanses” themselves are good or bad for health is also by no means
definite. But even people who refuse to swallow Fuhrman’s rhetoric and opinions
along with her soups may at least want to consider some of the recipes here,
because Fuhrman has come up with some good and interesting ones – provided that
people have the time to make the soups and the inclination to do vegan-style
shopping if they do not already practice that particular type of eating.

Oh – one more thing – the
recipe titles, like the book’s underlying philosophy, may or may not be widely
appealing. Fuhrman goes for the cutesy, and she likes names that end in
question marks or exclamation points: “Oh Dhal-ing!” “What the Hemp?” “I Can’t
Believe It’s Butternut!” “Oh Snap!” “You’re My Fava-rite!” “That’s Just Dandy!”
“Cauliflower Me, Maybe?!” Even the non-questioning, non-exclamatory names are
intended to be oh-so-adorable: “And the Beet Goes On,” “I Yam Who I Yam,” “Cure
for the Common Kohlrabi,” “I Don’t Carrot All What They Say,” “Lentil Me
Entertain You,” “Pho Sho,” “Don’t Kvass Me Any More Questions,” and so on. And
on. The soups themselves are, thankfully, better than their names: some are
hearty, some are spicy, some offer intriguing mixtures of vegetables, and some
are particularly interestingly spiced (although you have to be willing to spend
Whole Foods prices for some of those spices: this is emphatically not a book for the budget-sensitive).
The soups that take off from Oriental recipes and include plenty of ginger,
lemongrass, coconut, turmeric and similar ingredients are especially appealing.
Other recipes may be more of a hard sell, such as “Beet the Heat,” which
includes “raw organic beet kombucha,” sauerkraut, unpasteurized pickles and
more. Soupelina’s Soup Cleanse is a
“cause” book and a “California cool” book; it even contains a soup called
“Kale-ifornia Dreamin’.” Those not already committed to the “cleanse cause” and
those who are insufficiently with-it in California terms will scarcely be drawn
in by Fuhrman’s ideas and foods. But the book is not quite as limited in appeal
as it seems to be at first – although it is certainly not as universally useful
as it claims to be, and its assertions are best taken with a soupçon or two of the Himalayan pink salt
that Fuhrman includes in so many of her recipes.

How far can you push the piano? If you are
Chopin, you can push it deeply into expressiveness; Liszt, deeply into drama;
if you are John Cage, you can push it into “prepared” territory, changing many
of the inherent qualities of its sound. But there are other ways to push the
piano into new regions, for example by turning it almost literally into the
“orchestra in miniature” that Liszt saw it as being – by taking grand symphonic
works and creating versions of them for piano alone. This is scarcely a new
idea: Liszt himself was expert at it, as he showed in his arrangements of the
Beethoven symphonies (and even he was not the first to undertake that
particular task: he was preceded by Friedrich Kalkbrenner). Every once in a
while, though, the sheer daring of a piano arrangement of something symphonic
becomes breathtaking; and so it is with Bruno Walter’s four-hand arrangement of
Mahler’s “Resurrection” symphony. Even Mahler fanatics have not heard this
before – the new Naxos recording is a world première – and even those who know
Walter’s emotive conducting of Mahler’s symphonies, which often deviated from
the scores so as to bring out the feelings that Walter (who studied and worked
with Mahler and was friends with him) believed the composer intended to
emphasize, will have heard nothing like this. Variable in tempos and filled
with rubato Walter’s conducting may
have been, but when it comes to this handling of the Symphony No. 2, his
devotion to Mahler is absolute. This is an amazing feat, in one sense scaling
down the symphony but in another clarifying its structure and visualizing its
innards in much the way that X-rays illuminate bone. Walter is faithful to
Mahler’s scale, his tempos, his harmonies; but the inherent difference between
the sound of four hands on a piano (or, as in the present recording, two
separate pianos) and that of 100 musicians doubling parts and creating inner voices
and varieties of tension means that this arrangement sounds exactly like Mahler
and at the same time not at all like him. Mahler actually used the orchestra as
if it were a gigantic chamber group: instead of generally aiming for massed
sound in the Bruckner manner, he sought delicacy of color and care of aural
impressions by including a huge variety and number of instruments without
insisting that they play together all the time. The result is that when there is a full tutti, it is all the more overwhelming. That effect is inevitably
missing in Walter’s piano arrangement – but instead, listeners get to hear with
exceptional clarity the building blocks from which Mahler created this
monumental score, and to hear clearly how the pieces of the symphony connect to
and contrast with each other. The performance by Maasa Nakazawa and
Suhrud Athavale is more than serviceable, although it is not especially
Mahlerian – in the sense that one gets the feeling that these players would
have handled a Beethoven, Brahms or Bruckner arrangement in much the same way.
The notes are there, the tempos are followed and the harmonies are present, but
there is a certainly Mahlerian spirit missing – an absence that accentuates
that of the vocal forces in the fourth and fifth movements. Even Liszt had problems
with omitting the voices from the choral finale of Beethoven’s Ninth; Walter
encounters similar issues with Mahler’s Second. He solves them in a similar
way, by following the vocal lines in the piano and creating enough underlying
support to give these sections heft, if not verbiage. What is missing, though,
is grandeur, partly because of the inherent limitations of an arrangement like
this and partly because the pianists do not seem fully conversant with the
sheer scale of what Mahler did in this work. Nevertheless, this is a very
valuable recording and a must-have for Mahler lovers: it shows the inner
workings of the “Resurrection” symphony in ways that orchestral performances do
not, and indeed cannot. In so doing, it only increases one’s appreciation for
how magnificently Mahler handled this symphony’s musical material.

The first pianist to record
all the Liszt arrangements of Beethoven’s symphonies was Idil Biret, and that
is not the only way in which she pushed the boundaries of piano repertoire. Her
exceptionally strong and varied discography becomes increasingly impressive as
it grows and grows through new releases on the IBA (Idil Biret Archive) label. These
releases fall into separate series and, within the series, into re-releases of
older performances and new releases of ones recorded recently. The two latest
IBA recordings, in the Chamber Music
Edition and Solo Edition sequences,
are both new, the former from 2014 and the latter from 2015. Both show that
Biret, who is now 74, has lost none of her pianistic skill and none of the
thoughtful, analytical approach to music that, coupled with her sheer technical
ability, makes so many of her readings intellectually as well as sonically
thrilling. The Chamber Music Edition
recording of the two Brahms cello sonatas is especially good. The reason is
that Biret here has a partner (with whom she first worked as far back as 1970)
who matches her musical intellect and shares with her the same sense of Brahms’
scale and of the relationship the composer created between the cello and piano
in these sonatas. One would normally expect the string instrument to take the
lead much of the time in music of this sort, but Brahms’ own pianistic
predilections mean that the piano is the primary focus in these works more
often than not. Yet in the hands of Biret and Roderic von Bennigsen, what
emerges is not a contest for supremacy but a finely honed level of cooperation,
a true partnership that lends the music considerable stature and emotional
depth. These two sonatas are quite different. The first, Op. 38 in E minor, is
a deeply somber three-movement work with the pervasive “autumnal” quality so
often associated with Brahms. It also has some strong ties to Bach – just as
the Fourth Symphony, also in E minor, was later to have – and possesses in its
finale the same surprising combination of traditional formality with distinctly
Romantic emotional sensibility. Von Bennigsen and Biret have clearly thought
through all the elements of the work, and they deliver a fully convincing
reading as a result. Then they switch gears for the Op. 99 sonata, which is in
F and in four movements and is more outgoing and lyrical. It sounds almost as
if this is the earlier, more-youthful work and the first sonata is the later,
more-serious one. One of the difficulties with the second sonata is that the
first three movements are very well-constructed and effective, but the
concluding Allegro molto is a
less-substantial piece, a Rondo that does not quite measure up to what has come
before. The skill of these performers is such that this movement makes full
emotional sense in their reading – it never quite becomes a capstone for the
work, but it seems to follow more logically and with a greater sense of
rightness than it usually does. These sonatas show off Biret’s skill in chamber
music to a very fine degree, and show how fortunate she is to have a partner
such as von Bennigsen in music that requires such close collaborative effort.

The Bach disc in the Solo Edition is not quite at this level.
It certainly shows Biret’s elegantly stylish way with Bach, and demonstrates
for the umpteenth time that this pianist has the intellectual as well as technical
heft to make Bach’s solo music effective. But no pianist, Biret included, can
ever escape the reality that Bach did not write for the piano, and there is no
really good solution to playing him on this instrument. Making the piano sound
sere and spare only calls attention to the fact that it is not a harpsichord or
clavichord. Allowing it to flourish with the sound of which it is capable
produces performances that are out of keeping with the scale and intent of the
music. Biret, not surprisingly, stakes out a middle ground. She does not
overwhelm listeners with grand Romantic-era gestures and constant rubato, nor does she hold back the
piano’s sound to such a degree that it becomes constricted and constrained.
Instead, Biret delves into both the formal elegance and the emotional content
of Bach’s music, allowing it to flow naturally while effectively showcasing the
rhythmic differences among the dance forms in the Partita No. 1, French Suite No. 5, and English Suite No. 3. Biret’s formal skill comes through most
clearly in the Chromatic Fantasia and
Fugue in D minor, BWV 903, where her pacing and handling of the fugal
voices are well-balanced and as contrapuntally convincing as they can be on an
instrument not constructed for counterpoint. Not even Biret can make Bach sound
totally appropriate on the piano, but what she can do – and what she does do –
is to make his music appealing in a different way from that of the instruments
for which he intended it.

Still, the contrast between
Biret’s piano-Bach and Barbara Harbach’s organ-Bach shows the inherent
superiority of performing this music on the right type of instrument. Much like
Biret, Harbach is a thoughtful performer as well as an energetic one, and she
too gives the impression that she has thought through all the elements of every
work she plays long before she sits down for a performance. The two organs that
Harbach plays on a new MSR Classics CD are scarcely comparable to those of
Bach’s time: one, in Rochester, New York, dates to 1983, while the other, in
Lyons, New York, dates to 1970. But Harbach evokes the Baroque feeling of this
music through her skillful choice of stops, her adept blending of voices, and
her very clear understanding of Bach’s style and the extent to which an
interpreter must – and must not – vary from the printed notes. The program
given by Harbach is clearly a highly personal one – there is little inherent
connection among the works – but these pieces, one and all, give Harbach a
chance to show the great variety of sounds and styles that Bach brought to his
compositions and that the organ can put on display. The gradual addition of
voices to An Wasserflüssen
Babylon, BWV 653, for example,
contrasts strongly and appealingly with the striking immediacy of the opening
of the Prelude and Fugue in C Minor, BWV
546, which immediately follows on the disc. The stepwise, highly chromatic
opening of the Fantasy and Fugue in G
Minor, BWV 542 (usually called “Fantasia” rather than “Fantasy”) makes a
wonderful contrast with the much more declamatory start of the next work, Prelude and Fugue in E Minor (“Wedge”), BWV
548. Harbach handles all the fugues with care, precision and enough feeling
to make them sound like something well beyond dry exercises. Indeed, the
contrast between her improvisation-like approach to the first of the paired
movements (whether Prelude, Toccata or Fantasy) and her much more even,
almost-staid handling of the fugues is one of this disc’s particular pleasures.
Harbach, herself a composer, quite clearly understands the structural elements
of this music, and her sensitive readings show that she knows just when to draw
attention to the works’ foundations and when to let listeners hear just how
imposing an edifice Bach built upon those bases.

The piano is much better suited to the
music of Schubert than to that of Bach, not only because Schubert deliberately
wrote for it but also because Schubert’s melodic flow and his quicksilver key
switching seem ideal for an instrument that is essentially harmonic in nature
rather than contrapuntal. David Korevaar offers sensitive, nuanced
interpretations of two late Schubert piano sonatas, Nos. 18 and 20 (the latter
the composer’s penultimate one), on a fine new MSR Classics recording. No. 18
in G, D. 894, was the last sonata published during Schubert’s lifetime, and was
given the title “Fantasie” by the publisher because of the freewheeling nature
of the first movement. Quite unlike a Bach Fantasia, this movement one by
Schubert is songlike from the start and features a lyrical, lilting second
subject – and in fact the movement is in sonata form, although it tends to push
the form’s boundaries. One thing Korevaar does particularly well is to hold the
movement in formal check while still allowing its emotional overflow to pour
forth. The contrasts of the second movement, between gentleness and drama, also
come across well here, but what is most impressive by the end of the sonata is
the feeling of serenity that Korevaar communicates. There is a sense in which
all the contrasts of the music are designed to be merely brief excursions from
quietude. Sonata No. 20 in A, D. 959, is a different matter altogether. Here
Korevaar begins effectively with the opening drama, then lets the work slide
into gentler, more-lyrical territory with apparent ease. There is serenity in
this sonata too, notably at the end of the first movement, but by and large, there
are more highs and lows than in D894. This later work has lamentation in its
not-very-slow second movement (an Andantino),
considerable good spirits in its third, and pervasive lyricism in its
concluding Rondo. Korevaar picks up on all these emotions and lets them flow
naturally and pleasantly – indeed, a good adjective for the sonata as a whole
is “pleasant.” The sound of Korevaar’s piano – not the usual Steinway but a
Shigeru Kawai SK-7 – is interesting, with considerable liveliness but without
the rich resonance in the bass that one expects from Steinway. Korevaar plays
with feeling and adeptness, but the actual piano sound may not be to all
listeners’ liking. The quality of Korevaar’s performances, however, should be.

The musical creation of
dreamscapes is by no means simple and by no means done the same way by
different composers. That music has the power to transport listeners to places
amazing and imaginary, there is no doubt. But there is no inherent meaning to
any particular sequence of notes, any particular harmonic or contrapuntal construction,
and therefore the success of a work at disconnecting listeners from reality and
bringing them somewhere else depends as much on the audience as on the music’s
creator. It is crucial to bring listeners to the right imaginary landscape in order to communicate effectively with
them once they arrive. This is far from easy. Wagner accomplished it
brilliantly with his opening to Parsifal,
for example, but Mozart relied on staging and visualization rather than the
character of the music to pull the audience into the world of Die Zauberflöte.
Chronologically between these two examples lies Mendelssohn’s incidental music
for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and it
is as perfect a dreamship as was ever constructed. The well-paced and delicate
performance by the Swedish Chamber Orchestra under Thomas Dausgaard confirms
this yet again, if further confirmation be necessary. The grandeur of the
ever-popular Wedding March is here, to be sure, but what is most impressive in
this performance is the delicacy with which Dausgaard presents the quieter,
more dreamlike musical material, such as the Notturno. It is the gentleness of
the more-even-tempered segments that makes the brighter and bouncier ones so
effective by contrast, and Dausgaard understands this well. In fact, it is
clear from the very start, in his handling of the ever-amazing Overture, whose
four opening chords so clearly raise the curtain on a world different from and
yet allied to the real one, a fantasy world where spirits scurry as love seeks love
and “rude mechanicals” play out their roles with enthusiasm and utterly without
understanding. Mendelssohn’s music for A
Midsummer Night’s Dream remains a marvel, and poised and sensitive
performances like this one ensure that it continues to sound like one. The additional
evocative works on the CD complement A
Midsummer Night’s Dream very well. The
Beautiful Melusine has all the yearning and drama befitting the story of
the water spirit in human form who, when seen by her husband as she truly is,
must return to the waters. And The
Hebrides broods, swirls and surges with strength and intensity, sweeping
listeners into a dark, impassioned world that seems the stuff of dreams even
though Fingal’s Cave, which inspired the overture, is very much a real place.
Dreamer Mendelssohn may have been, but he knew how to bring his dreams to real
audiences in ways that continue to inspire listeners’ flights of fancy today.

Rain Worthington clearly
wants to reach out to and reach people in a similar way, but on the evidence of
a new (+++) Navona CD, she does not have the tools to do so effectively. She
certainly has the musical tools,
albeit a rather deliberately limited set of them: her work is pervaded by the
typical contemporary tropes of minimalism and constricted and oft-repeated
harmonies and forms of orchestration (she favors tone clusters in the woodwinds
and upper strings). There are dreamlike and nightmarish inspirations underlying
the seven orchestral works on this disc, and there is emotional reaching-out in
all of them, but the problem is that it sounds like the same reaching-out, no matter what the inspiration behind each work.
Worthington repeatedly contrasts sounds of desolation with ones that have a
kind of intellectualizing, distancing effect, as if the way to move through and
past despair is to separate oneself from the emotions it provokes. There is no
triumphalism here and little that is joyous or even especially life-affirming.For example, Shredding Glass, a response to the terrorist murders of September
11, 2001 in New York City, although it is scarcely placid, seems to find an
adequate response to the horror only by standing back and avoiding a visceral
reaction to it. Similarly, Within a
Dance, subtitled “A Tone Poem of Love,” assiduously avoids grand
Romantic-style sweeping gestures and as a result produces diminished, if not
exactly minimized, emotions. Yet Still
Night, whose subtitle is “A Nocturne for Orchestra,” sounds no more
nocturnal than Tracing a Dream or Fast Through Dark Winds, both of which go
some distance to create dreamscapes (not always pleasant ones) but offer no
truly satisfactory escape from them. Worthington titles these orchestral pieces
cleverly, but swapping the titles around would make little if any difference:
the works use essentially the same procedures to approach the audience in
essentially the same way. The fact that Worthington wants to involve listeners
emotionally puts her music a cut above that of contemporary composers who seem
to create mainly for themselves and others in their circle; but the narrow
range of techniques that Worthington employs and the similar way she uses them
from piece to piece combine to make this not-particularly-lengthy CD (55
minutes) seem to go on and on in the same vein of heard-it-before repetition.

Dream pictures are displayed
more effectively on a new (++++) MSR Classics CD of well-known works by Franck
and Bloch and a world première recording
of a short Berceuse by Julien Krein
(1913-1996). Here as on the Worthington disc, many of the same techniques are
employed to produce emotional communication, but the three composers
represented use them in different ways – and the effect is less of ordinary
dreams than of wider-ranging ones that come closer to mystical visions. This is
not to lay too much at the foot of the music: all these pieces come across
effectively without requiring listeners to delve into their spiritual
undercurrents. Yet they invite such
exploration for those who wish to undertake it, and the care and sensitivity of
the performances by Zina Schiff and Cameron Grant make it easy for those so
inclined to explore as they wish. For example, Schiff and Grant pay particular
attention to the cyclicality of the Franck Sonata, clearly bringing forth the
recurring thematic elements without drawing undue attention to them. Although
nothing here repeats in the manner of an idée
fixe, the use of the reflective-sounding main theme throughout helps give
the sonata its dreamlike quality, that theme being employed very differently –
and, in this performance, to very good effect – in the intensity of the second
movement and contrastingly in the fantasia-like, freely expressive third.
Franck then brings the emotional explorations of the first three movements to a
triumphant conclusion in the finale, leaving behind a sense of awakening from
drifting thoughts into bright sunlight. In contrast, Bloch’s Poème Mystique is comparatively
serene, even tranquil, although – as the title indicates – it reaches for a
certain level of mystical insight and spiritual connection: halfway through its
single extended movement, it quotes a motif previously employed by Bloch in his
Jewish cycle and then switches quickly to music from the Latin Mass (Bloch even
places the Latin text above his musical notation, lest anyone miss the
connection). Simpler and more straightforward than his first sonata for violin
and piano, this second one is attractively lyrical and has a very specific
connection with dreams: it was inspired by one that Bloch had after taking an
overdose of a barbiturate. The final work here, Krein’s, dates to the same
decade as Bloch’s, having been written in 1928 (Bloch’s sonata is from 1924;
Franck’s is much earlier, dating to 1886). The overall sound and use of harmony
are somewhat similar in the Bloch and Krein works, and Krein’s piece shares Bloch’s
work’s sense of mystery, if not its depth. This Berceuse makes a pleasant, rather superficial encore after the two
more-substantial works, allowing a gentle close to a recital both dreamlike and
thoughtful.

The adorable penguin pals
created by Rebecca Ashdown in Bob and Flo
are back for another day of fun at preschool in Bob and Flo Play Hide-and-Seek. This time they have fun with a
third preschool penguin, Sam. The story is simplicity itself: the three play
hide-and-seek, with Flo and Sam looking for Bob – but it turns out that Bob is
not very good at hiding, and needs some advice from his friends in order to get
better at it. He does, and everyone is happy. The pleasure here is not just in
the story but in the way Ashdown tells it. For example, because counting to 20
is hard for preschoolers, “Flo and Sam counted to ten. Twice!” That sounds like
just what creative human preschoolers would do. As for the “hiding” issue, Bob
is adorably inept, first “hiding” by crossing his flippers in front of his
face, then – when his friends say to hide behind something – holding up a small
mirror and hiding “behind” it. It is only when Flo and Sam tell Bob to
“disappear” that he finally figures out what to do: he builds a wall of blocks
in a sort-of-penguin shape and sort-of-penguin colors, and hides behind it. And
sure enough, he has managed to disappear. Cute characters, ultra-simple words
and just enough activity to be involving for young readers combine to make this
second story of penguin pals as much fun as the first one.

The equally adorable “chickies” of
Janee Trasler are already the stars of numerous board books, and now there is
yet another one – which combines their usual high activity level with a touch
of education, in the form of opposites. Pig, Cow and Sheep, the “adult” animals
in these books, declare that it is time for some pictures – using, it should be
pointed out, an old-fashioned film camera, which may need to be explained to
the very young children for whom the book is intended. The “picture” premise
gives Trasler a ready way to show the difference between, for example, in and
out (the chickies are inside a box of dress-up clothes and then outside it),
and little and big (single chickie compared with double – that is, one standing
on another). Trasler then plays with readers’ rhyme expectations to make the book
funnier; for instance, “Chickies then. Chickies now./ Chickies dance and take
a....COW!” That is, not a bow. And to
rhyme with “big,” the chickies do not
wear a wig – instead, they look at Pig. Readers then expect “leap” to be the rhyme
in this water-based sequence: “Chickies shallow. Chickies deep./ Chickies run
and jump and.…SHEEP!” Pictures are taken of all the various configurations of
the chickies and the “grown-up” animals, and at the end, everyone falls down
into a big, laughing pile – a suitably amusing conclusion to a book packed with
frenetic activity of all sorts.

There is plenty happening as
well in Splat the Cat and the Quick
Chicks, which is based on Rob Scotton’s characters but not created by him:
it is a Level 1 book in the “I Can Read!” series (featuring “simple sentences
for eager new readers”). These are more realistic-looking chicks than Trasler’s,
and they behave more realistically, too, although Splat and his best friend,
Seymour the mouse, are as human-child-like as usual. The dozen chicks start out
as eggs, which Splat takes home from school to watch overnight. But while he
sleeps, the eggs hatch – and the chicks get into everything. They are on Splat
himself, and cuddled in his socks, and curled up by his old-fashioned alarm clock,
and all over Splat’s toys – even, in the case of one chick, “in the paint box. Ick.” Splat finds 11 of the chicks but
cannot locate the 12th until it turns up pecking at a basket, then
promptly runs away. Splat, Seymour and all the chicks run upstairs, downstairs
and all over the house as Splat tries to gather the chicks and also get ready
for school. Finally, everyone gets out the door, with the chicks very amusingly
trailing Splat and Seymour by using their wings to hold onto an electrical cord
(the most unrealistic thing these chicks do, and worth the unreality to see the
book’s best picture). Everyone makes it to school safely, but when Splat’s
teacher, Mrs. Wimpydimple, counts the chicks, there are only 11 – again, as at
Splat’s home, one is missing! However, it soon turns up, hiding behind the
apple on the teacher’s desk, and this pleasantly silly story of “quick chicks”
comes to an amusing close.

After all that bird-related
activity, it is a distinct pleasure to settle back with a bird book that
celebrates lack of activity and has a
gentler, slower pace. The Happy Egg,
originally published in 1967, is by Ruth Krauss (1901-1993), with illustrations
by her husband, Crockett Johnson (1906-1975). The book is by no means as well-known
as, say, the pair’s The Carrot Seed
(1945), but it is quite a charmer in its own right. Republished in 2005 and now
available in a new edition, the book starts with a picture showing just a small
flower and “a little little bird,” in the form of a blue egg. The egg cannot do
anything by itself: “It could just get sat on.” And along comes an obliging white
bird to do just that. The bird sits and sits and sits and sits – and the flower
grows and grows and grows and grows, a truly wonderful way to show the passage
of time. Finally, the little blue bird emerges with a big “POP!” And it does
what little birds do – it walks, sings an elaborate tune (with musical stave
and G clef), and flies: the left-hand page simply has the word “fly” on it,
while the bird is seen at the extreme upper right corner of the right-hand
page, and this minimalist approach is an absolute delight. A great contrast to
the frenetic nature more common in bird-focused books created for young readers
today, The Happy Egg is a joy from
start to finish: a very short book offering very long-lasting pleasure.

Last of the Giants: The Rise and
Fall of Earth’s Most Dominant Species. By Jeff Campbell. Zest Books.
$13.99.

Harry Potter Magical Creatures
Coloring Book. Scholastic. $15.99.

The interesting thing about
the title of the Ericson sisters’ highly amusing “bird book” is that reversing the first letters of the
characters’ names would give a clue to the whole plot. Think of “Bill and
Dizzy” and you imagine one staid, straightforward character (and one with a
bill) and one that is rather – well, dizzy. What is so much fun in Dill & Bizzy, though, is that both characters are oddballs, as the
subtitle makes clear, but the duck (drawn comparatively realistically)
considers himself quite ordinary, while the “strange bird” (which looks a bit
like an escapee from a Dr. Seuss book) is well aware of his peculiarities and
only wishes the duck shared them so they could become friends. Well, it turns
out that the duck is just as odd as the whatever-it-is, to such an extent that when
Bizzy decides to take a bicycle ride, “ordinary duck” Dill is ready to go along
on his unicycle – and when Bizzy balances bagels on his nose and says an odd
duck could do the same, Dill explains that because he is so ordinary, the best
he can do is to juggle some ordinary peanuts while upside-down. There are definitely
the makings of a beautiful friendship here, with Nora Ericson’s story making it
clear that these two strange birds are well-matched and Lisa Ericson’s
illustrations driving the point home through page after page of parallel
silliness. The climax comes when the two birds, tired after all their
activities, decide to splash in the fountain where Dill lives. Bizzy dives
right in and is glad to be with an ordinary, water-loving duck – except that
Dill explains that he cannot swim and has to use floaties. After this, the two
birds decide that they might as well be best friends even though one is so
thoroughly oddball and the other is, by his own standards, so thoroughly
ordinary – which means, as Bizzy points out, that in fact Dill is “extra-ordinary.”

The mother duck and two ducklings in Duck, Duck, Dinosaur are more ordinary
than Dill, but Kallie George adds something extra-ordinary to the mix – a very
big something. Mama Duck is first seen awaiting the hatching of her three eggs,
one of which is suspiciously larger than the other two. The first two eggs
hatch nicely, with the two fluffy ducklings immediately becoming
hyper-competitive as to which is bigger, Feather or Flap. While they argue, the
third egg – the gigantic one – cracks open, and out comes a dinosaur that,
thanks to Oriol Vidal’s illustrations, looks strange even by the standards of
children’s books. He is all head (vaguely that of a predator, but with blunt
teeth and pronounced overbite) and feet (gigantic ones), with almost no body at
all. Mama Duck, filled with mother love, simply names him Spike and sets about
enjoying her newly enlarged family. Now all three hatchlings compete for
attention: Feather brings Mama a flower, so Flap brings a whole bouquet, and
Spike rips a huge tree out of the ground and makes it his present to Mama Duck.
Spike talks only in single words and sounds: “Sweet!” “Funny!” “Brrrr!” The two
ducklings are much more expressive and argumentative. But in the end, the
differing personalities and sizes – and species – matter not a whit, because
“under Mama’s wings, no one was bigger, or sweeter, or funnier, or better. They
were all the best. The best family.” And there you have a dinosaur-sized
helping of warmth that will elicit an “awwww” from young readers – or at least
from adults.

A much more serious look at giant creatures
omits dinosaurs entirely, not because some dinos were tiny but because Last of the Giants focuses on megafauna that
existed long after the age of dinosaurs.Jeff Campbell’s selection of 13 creatures is a very personal one, and
not entirely consistent: it includes the very small passenger pigeon, for
reasons that Campbell explains in his introduction, and also includes two other
non-megafauna animals, the red wolf and thylacine. Campbell says he is
primarily interested in “animals that dominated their environments,” often
because of their size but sometimes for other reasons. But even accepting
Campbell’s comment at face value makes some of his choices a bit hard to
understand. For example, Last of the
Giants includes the huge flightless birds called the moa (from New Zealand)
and elephant bird (from Madagascar). But it omits Australia’s seven-foot-tall,
500-pound Genyornis newtoni –
undoubtedly because that bird went extinct (apparently largely because of human
predation of its eggs) tens of thousands of years ago, and Campbell focuses on
extinctions within the last 500 years or so. So this is less a book about
megafauna and other apex predators or environmentally significant creatures
than it is a look at large and/or impressive animals that went extinct between
roughly 1500 (moa) and 2011 (western black and Vietnam Javan rhinoceros).
Within its somewhat fuzzy focus, Last of
the Giants explores human interaction with now-extinct creatures and
discusses the complex relationship between people and animals. Thankfully,
Campbell does not take the all-too-common view that humans are some sort of
pestilence, destroying other creatures willy-nilly. Regarding rhinos, for
instance, he notes that they “find themselves in the same precarious position
as so many other giant species whose fate is in our hands. Because of us, rhinos
have become one of Earth’s most endangered species; yet without us, they would
be long gone already.” That is, while some humans, such as poachers, destroy
animals, others – conservationists and scientists – work to preserve them. All
the creatures in Last of the Giants
eventually succumbed to forces in whose involvement humans had a greater or
lesser, more direct or less direct, role. In addition to the six entries
already mentioned, Campbell discusses the aurochs, Steller’s sea cow, Indian
Ocean giant tortoises, the California grizzly, certain lions, some tigers, and
the baiji (a type of river dolphin). Of this last, he writes, “We loved the
baiji, but it wasn’t enough. …Scientists barely understood the species, and
they couldn’t agree on how to care for it.” Conservation attempts failed; a
combination of factors relating to human encroachment eventually doomed the
species. Like most contemporary writers about environmental topics, Campbell is
very well-meaning but has a significant blind spot. The elephant (or other
megafauna) in the room where conservation is concerned is human overpopulation –
the ultimate issue affecting everything from energy use to deforestation to
species extinction. Well-meaning First World scientists and researchers can do
all they want to try to assist and preserve species, but as long as the human
population grows essentially unchecked – and more quickly in less-developed
countries than in developed ones – everyday human needs for food, shelter and
energy are always going to put pressure on animals. Sometimes the pressure will
be unsustainable and the animals will disappear. Campbell’s (+++) book is
scarcely the only one to fail to acknowledge this reality. It is simply naïve to
say, as he does of the baiji, that this river dolphin “was the first cetacean
driven to extinction by humans, but we need to change our ways if we want it to
be the last.” That is a distinctly First World formulation. The reality is that
unless the entire world addresses its population issues – whose complexity has
deep societal, tribal and religious elements – no amount of well-meaning intervention
will be enough to sustain threatened species in the wild. And unfortunately, a
willingness to confront the issue of human population is notably absent from
virtually all discussions of climate change and species disappearance.

No climate on Earth or, as far as we know,
anywhere else, ever produced the things seen in the Harry Potter Magical Creatures Coloring Book, but the human imagination
can conceive of beings that even Mother Nature cannot bring into being (or at
least has not). Fans of the eight Harry Potter films, from which the pictures in
this coloring book were taken, will likely recognize at least some and perhaps
many of the black-and-white characters and scenes that are available for
coloring in any way one chooses – along the lines of the actual film stills (color
pictures taken from a number of scenes are included) or using a different
palette altogether. The book is a (+++) release for hardcore, highly devoted
fans only, because there is nothing in it except the black-and-white pages to
color and the colored pictures on which to base (or not base) one’s own
approach to the creatures. That is, nothing here actually explains anything
about any creature or scene, or even says which movie a page comes from. The
assumption appears to be that anyone who wants this book will be so devoted to
the whole Harry Potter movie universe that he or she will be able to identify
all the creatures and the scenes in which they appear – or perhaps will not
care what comes from where, but will simply be delighted to re-encounter these
flights of imaginative fancy. Many people may remember such scenes as Harry’s
meeting with Dobby and Dumbledore’s gentle handling of his phoenix, but the
merpeople and certain specific dragons may be less easily recollected. In any
case, the purpose of this book is to re-immerse fans of the Harry Potter films
in the world the movies’ directors created – and thus, indirectly, in the world
as originally envisioned by J.K. Rowling. The Harry Potter books have never
really dropped from public consciousness, and Rowling continues adding to the
mythic universe she created, so the Harry
Potter Magical Creatures Coloring Book is sure to find a receptive audience
among Potterphiles. It will not, however, entrance anyone who is not already
captivated by the way the movies imagined and reimagined Rowling’s novels.